Meditations

Pope Francis on the Problem of Cars in Cities

Posted on April 28, 2025 in Meditations 4

In the wake of his death, many have shared this observation from his 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si’

The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape. Many specialists agree on the need to give priority to public transportation. Yet some measures needed will not prove easily acceptable to society unless substantial improvements are made in the systems themselves, which in many cities force people to put up with undignified conditions due to crowding, inconvenience, infrequent service and lack of safety. (153)

But I was especially struck by this, a statement likely to be confronting to many architects:

It is not enough to seek the beauty of design. More precious still is the service we offer to another kind of beauty: people’s quality of life, their adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance. (150)

That’s it. The beauty is not in the thing humans have built, however much we may be dazzled by photos and renderings. The beauty is in the transformation of people’s lives.

That’s why I’m an advocate of public transit service, and an advocate of infrastructure only if it makes the service better.

The Flaneur on Public Transport

Posted on July 14, 2024 in Meditations, Philosophy

A person who wanders aimlessly in a city, purely for pleasure, is called a flaneur. But we should be open to the possibilities of extending this experience with public transport.

Last month, on a Sunday morning during my UK trip, I set out from my rented flat in Birmingham to wander the central city. It was very early, so to the extent that I had an objective it was to find the earliest-to-open place that served decent coffee. But I stumbled upon an especially beautiful old rail station: Birmingham Moor Street.

Curious, I went in, only to discover that there was an express train leaving soon for Stratford-upon-Avon, famous as the home of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare hadn’t been on my mind that morning at all, but he consumed a decade of my life long ago, and I still have plenty of reverence for him. So I got on the train and had a pleasant several hours wandering in Stratford.

Most people, at most times, aren’t acting out of this kind of leisure. Mostly we have places to be. But this accident reminded me again of why trip planning software can never replace maps, good signage, and a range of other visual signals. I had no intention to go to Stratford until I discovered the possibility. I would not have responded to a message on the internet suggesting I go to Stratford, because this would have been either a generic ad — which I’d ignore because it’s generic — or an astute suggestion based on a deep knowledge of my interests — which I’d welcome from a human but ignore, because it’s creepy and invasive, if it came from a machine.

(In this am I admitting my age? I grew up at a time when you looked to the physical world for information, and while I can certainly use the internet my first instinct is always to look about me. But if this were so unusual, why do British city centers invest so much in wayfinding — maps and signs designed not to give us direction but to show us possibilities? People do not travel in order to stare at their phones.)

So it’s interesting, too, that British buses often advertise themselves in a way that I’ve never seen in North America outside of specialized tourist services. While bus operators have a generic bus they can assign to any route, in Birmingham and Cardiff I’ve noticed buses branded to a particular route, prominently advertising its frequency and a sequence of destinations. I see this bus and think “I could go to [place] from here, every 7 minutes.” I might remember that. Even wandering the city as a flaneur, I might respond to one of these buses just as I might respond to an interesting alley or byway. Oh, I could go there right now, and now that you mention it, I think I will.

Do You Really Want to Live in “Perceived Time”?

Posted on April 4, 2022 in Meditations

Salvador Dali, “Profile of Time” Photo by Wikimedia Commons user “Julo”.

As you may have noticed, humans don’t perceive time passing at a constant rate. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” we say, or “the meeting was only an hour but it felt like an eternity.”

This phenomenon has obvious relevance to transportation and urban design. It’s well established, for example, that a walk seems to take less time if it’s more pleasant. Countless studies have established this as a matter of human psychology, and you probably also know this from your own experience.

But when the behavior science literature talks about improving perceived time, we should pause before deciding that this is the kind of time that matters.

As a transportation planner who sometimes works with architects, I often have this conversation:

Me: “If you design it that way, these people will have a 15 minute walk.”

Architect: “But it’s a beautiful walk, so it won’t feel like 15 minutes.”

The architect’s implication is that perceived time is what’s real. If a walk is so pleasant that it feels like five minutes, then you won’t notice that it’s actually 15.

Well, maybe you won’t, but the people waiting for you will. If you have to punch a timeclock at work, try telling your boss: “I’m not really late, because my perception of time is that I got here ten minutes ago.” For that matter, try telling that to the friends waiting to meet you, or to your spouse or child at home.

Perceived time is a crucial dimension of the human experience, and an important source of joy. Perhaps you have had the pleasure of just wandering, in a city or wilderness, without goal, deadline, or destination. [1] You just walk, drink in the sensations of the place, and when you come to a place where you could go one way or another, you go whichever way feels right, without regard to where you will end up. But important as these experiences are, they always end in ways that throw you back into objective time. The sun sets, or a business you need is about to close, or you have to meet someone.

Perceived time can be a great experience, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but it could also be called selfish time. Objective time, by contrast, could also be called social time. Social creatures cannot all live by their own clock. It is only by respecting objective time that humans can show up for each other in all the ways that make jobs, friendships, and families possible.

There is an obvious class dimension to this issue. If you make a trip longer in order to make it more pleasant, you’re imposing delay on people who can least afford it. When we decide to sacrifice low-income people’s objective time to improve their perceived time, we are measurably reducing their access to the things they need, thus measurably impoverishing their lives. To avoid these impacts, a logical and just approach to design and infrastructure would first focus on making the best use of people’s objective time, and only then, in cases where objective time is not at stake, work to improve perceived time.

So behavior science thinking is always at serious risk of elite projection. When someone says that a journey can be longer as long as it feels faster, I always ask, “for whom will it feel faster, and is that the only person who matters?”

[1] The French call this activity flânerie, and the person doing it a flâneur, a word that has come over into English in literary and urbanist contexts.

People Who Love War Hate Cities

Posted on March 13, 2022 in General, Meditations

Kyiv in 2022. Kyivcity.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

People who love war hate cities.

Cities are places where people who are different from each other learn not to fear each other. They find that they can share a public space with people who don’t look like them, talk like them, or act the way they would act, and that it’s almost always fine. People who profit from fear hate that.

Cities produce visibility. It is easier to not care about poverty or homelessness or the mental health crisis if you see them only on television, but in the city it’s all right in front of you. It’s easy to believe that those demonstrators are all hoodlums if you’re not on the street with them hearing their actual voices. In a city there is no avoiding the facts of what a society is, and what its conflicts are. Cities are where we see each other. People who don’t want to see hate that.

Cities and their people are vulnerable. So many people so close together. So easily destroyed by just one disaster, or just one bomb. So easy for anyone to enter, no matter how hostile their intentions. We don’t have city walls anymore. We have the opposite: Openness and vulnerability are the very form of the modern city. People who feel safe only behind walls hate that.

So lots of people hate cities. And yet cities are centers of prosperity and opportunity and wealth, so they must be controlled, even by people who don’t much like them. That struggle to control cities is everywhere: in politics, in policing, in city planning, and when all else fails, in war.

So of course, in time of war, it’s always the city that’s destroyed, and urban people who are massacred. That’s always how it’s been. Cities aren’t just attacked because of what country they’re in, or because of a resource they represent. They’re attacked because of what a city is.

Induced Demand: An Axiom of Biology

Posted on January 10, 2022 in Induced Demand, Meditations, Philosophy, Prediction, Urban Structure

Figuring out the relationship between this tweet and this article is left as an exercise for the reader.

Induced demand is the observed fact that if you make something easier to do, people will do it more. For example, if you create new capacity for cars in a place where travel demand is high, the result is more cars. If you build more capacity to “fix congestion”, you end up back near the same level of congestion you had before.

After decades of observing this pattern, most people are still reluctant to face what this means. Part of the problem is that we’re presenting induced demand as an observed discovery, which allows us to quarrel over data, research methods etc.

But induced demand isn’t just an observed fact. It’s also an axiom of biology. We are as sure about it as we are of the facts of math. This means we don’t really need to be doing this experiment over and over, just as we don’t need to keep measuring circles to be sure of the value of pi.

In this context an axiom is a statement that can be taken as true because it is part of the definition of a concept you are using, or follows logically from that definition. The value of pi is axiomatic because it follows from the definition of a circle, in standard Euclidean space that describes our everyday world.

Now consider the concept of an organism. It implies that:

The thing consumes some resource from its environment, in order to have enough energy.
It will expend energy getting this resource.
Therefore, it must run a positive balance sheet: The energy it spends getting the resource must be less than the energy the resource will provide.

We humans are organisms, so we do what they do. In particular:

To have enough energy, we seek resources. Money is a symbolic resource in this sense. We also have other needs like shelter and security that also require resources.
We need to get these things in way that minimizes energy costs. This is what I mean by easy.

We are mobile creatures, rather than barnacles or oysters, so this pursuit of resources often requires traveling. This means that time is also part of this basic calculation that determines survival. The time spent pursuing a resource can’t be spent pursuing other resources, or doing other necessary things like sleeping. So we must minimize our costs in both energy (which includes money) and time, while gaining as much energy (money) as possible.

From this it follows that people will tend to travel in ways that maximize their access to resources while minimizing energy cost (time and money) and danger. People don’t always do this exactly, but the underlying biological imperative is unavoidable.

This means that:

If driving suddenly becomes easier (lower time and energy cost) than taking transit, more people will shift to driving, increasing congestion. This is why road widening in high-demand places tend to lead to more traffic.
If a road widening makes it possible for developers to save money (i.e. energy) by building in more distant places where land is cheaper, they will do that.
This process changes the shape of the urban area so that people travel longer distances (due to sprawl) at slower speeds (due to congestion).
Therefore the average organism will need to expend more time and energy to reach the same resources it reached before. (Your job flees from downtown to a distant business park where taxes are lower. Your grocery store closes because a WalMart opened two miles away where you can’t walk to it, or even walk from the nearest point that a bus could get to.) The organism will also be exposed to more danger as a result.
On average, organisms in this system end up in a weakened state, with a worse balance sheet of energy expended vs energy gained.

The organisms in this story are all trying to harvest more energy than they spend in the act of harvesting. Even unimaginable aliens on distant planets would do this in the same situation. So it’s axiomatic that, in the absence of other pressures, road widening in a high-demand area will induce more traffic and more sprawl.

So although road-building departments keep doing the induced demand experiment many times every year, and getting the same results, you don’t need to do more experiments, just as you don’t need to keep measuring circles to be sure of the value of pi. You can add complexity by taking this into the human sciences and trying to model subtleties of human behavior, but all the resulting insights will be marginal compared to the axiomatic fact that above all, we’re organisms, so we’ll do what organisms do.

Working on Climate Change? I Have a Question

Posted on March 7, 2020 in General, Language, Meditations

Like many people, I’m terrified of climate change and see it as an important reason for my work. But when I listen to climate activists, or the politicians they have trained, I’m puzzled by a word that they use. It’s planet. We have to “save the planet,” they say.

On the surface, there are two obvious problems with this word choice, so there must be some more subtle reason for using it, one that I need to be enlightened on.

First, the everyday meaning of planet, the one we learned in high school, is something like “a sufficiently large ball of matter orbiting a star.” If that’s what a planet is, then climate change doesn’t threaten the planet. Earth as a ball of rock will be fine.

So when we say “save the planet” we’re using planet in a newer and different way to mean something like biosphere — the sum of all life. Actually, the meaning seems purposely fuzzy: do we think climate change will destroy all life on earth, or just destroy lots of species, or destroy our civilization, or destroy us?

In my work as an explainer, I try not to coin new words, or create new meanings of words, if there’s any way I can avoid it. There’s an unavoidable rush of power when you create a word or meaning. However worthy the reason for your coinage is, it sounds like you’re telling people that they’ve been talking wrong all their lives and only you are talking right. Because the way we talk is semi-conscious and hard to change, people can feel that attack subconsciously, not even articulating why it bothers them. But like many subconscious responses it can make them defensive, which keeps them from getting to where we need them to be.

Second, many people who don’t care much about the “planet” care very much about civilization, including mainstream conservatives. Apart from some survivalists and those awaiting an imminent Rapture, conservatives want to conserve their society — to keep it from changing too rapidly. If we wanted them to hear us, it seems to me, we’d speak of climate change as a threat to civilization.

Speaking that way, we’d also be talking about something that we can be pretty sure about. Nobody can predict the biological consequences of climate change, but we know what happens when the support systems of civilization collapse, because it’s happened many times in history: Starvation, mass migration, wars (and personal violence) over declining resources. Far more people would be horrified by this prospect than are horrified by threats to polar bears — however much the latter, and biodiversity in general, may matter to you and me.

Climate change has a moral dimension, regarding whether we have the right to destroy other life, but the most acute climate anxiety is about fears for ourselves and our children, not fears for the “planet.” It’s about looking at your children and wondering if they’ll starve, or kill and die in wars, or live in patriarchal bands where rape is routine — all things humans have done repeatedly under similar pressures. We have a robust genre of apocalyptic literature increasingly focused on imagining a world in which civilization has collapsed. If you wanted to alarm conservatives into action, it seems to me that you’d talk about this.

So why do I so rarely hear advocates or politicians say that climate change threatens civilization? Why do we keep using the word planet? Please enlighten me.

The Fishing Pier Problem in Public Transit Equity

Posted on February 24, 2020 in Basics, Meditations, Rail Transit

Photo: Heditor6, Wikimedia Commons

Have you ever heard people say: “They got that transit improvement in their neighborhood! We deserve to have one in our neighborhood!”

But does this demand always makes sense?

Imagine a city on a lake or ocean, where neighborhoods near the water tend to be wealthier than those inland. Suppose the city has a plan to build several fishing piers, but all the proposed piers are in the wealthy neighborhoods on the waterfront. Isn’t that unfair?

No, I think you’d say, because fishing piers only work if they’re on the water. If you were concerned with equity, maybe you’d propose a program that helps inland people get to the waterfront fishing piers quickly. But you wouldn’t support an inland elected official’s battle to get a fishing pier on dry land in their neighborhood, because it wouldn’t be useful for fishing.

In short, the point isn’t to equitably distribute fishing piers. It’s to equitably distribute the ability to fish.

In the transit business, when a cool new thing is created somewhere, you always hear the rest of the city say: when do we get that cool thing? You’ll hear this about everything, from subway lines to Bus Rapid Transit to little vans that come to your door. Enormous amounts of money get spent trying to act on this principle.

The typical pattern goes like this:

Cool new transit thing x is introduced, and deployed in one or two places in the city where it makes sense. (Let’s build a fishing pier on the waterfront!)
Other neighborhoods demand the same thing, often claiming it’s unjust or inequitable that they don’t have it. (Why don’t our inland neighborhoods have fishing piers?)
Often the cool new thing is actually built in those other neighborhoods that demand it, but it doesn’t work well there, because the geography is wrong for it. (A fishing pier is actually built inland, extending across a patch of grass, but nobody uses it.)

The marketing of cool new transit things can make this problem worse. The more you put out the message that light rail or BRT or microtransit or “Metro Rapid” is cool and different and better than “ordinary” buses, the more mad people will be if their neighborhood just gets ordinary buses. That leads to political pressure to bring the cool new thing to a place where it just doesn’t work very well, which in turn leads to the cool new thing failing, just as an inland fishing pier will fail.

You’ll get the best transit mobility if we use the tool that works with your geography, even if it’s different from what works in other places.

So perhaps it makes no sense to equitably distribute any cool transit thing. It makes sense to equitably distribute the ability to go lots of places quickly on transit.

How would our transit debates be different if we did this?

A New Years Letter, with Unsolicited Advice

Posted on January 14, 2020 in Meditations

This is our little consulting firm’s New Years letter to the world …

Friends, Clients, and Colleagues,

Jarrett's photo A New Years Letter is supposed to wish you all the best while talking about all our own wonderful news. We have some news, and I’ll share it below. But I also want to think with you about how to face a decade that could be the most challenging of our lives.

As we do transit plans in many cities, we’re hearing a lot of hope and a lot of anger, but we’re also hearing a word that I didn’t hear much a decade ago: emergency.

We have the “climate emergency,” an endlessly blaring alarm that unites all natural disasters into one. My Australian friends spent New Years Eve fleeing from 50-foot walls of flame. Young people come to our meetings asking what this thing we’re discussing will do for the climate, by which they mean: “Am I going to have a world to live in?”

But problems of social justice and inequality also look more like emergencies now. I spent much of November in Chile, watching “the most stable country in Latin America” explode in rage and chaos about an economic system that had been considered perfectly normal the week before. Social inequality, however you define it, is a potential emergency every bit as much as climate is.

Emergency is a frightening word. It says: “Do everything differently now, or else,” but people who just try to “do something” often do the wrong thing. Our challenge as a profession is to figure out how all these ringing alarms should affect how we do our jobs, and how we talk about them.

Most of us work in big organizations with complex webs of bureaucratic requirements and processes. We all spend time complying with rules, rather than solving problems or creating opportunities.

Most of those rules have purposes, and I am not calling for open rebellion against them. But to people outside our profession, it can look like we’re performing slow and mysterious rituals while the house is on fire.

So here are some new year resolutions we’re taking on as a firm. Maybe they’re useful to you.

I will act as if what I’m doing matters, because it does. Transit is a key tool that can ease many of the crises that are triggering fear and rage, so how you do your job is affecting the world. That’s true whether you drive a bus, design a bus route, audit compliance, or do any other of the thousand things that keep our industry running.
If something doesn’t matter, I will stop doing it and stop telling others to do it. Those of us who create procedures have a special responsibility to make sure that everything we tell people to do is actually helping make things better.
I will help people understand. Practice explaining what you do and why it matters in plain language. Transit is a widely misunderstood topic. We must be patient and clear in helping everyone see how it works, so that they can make decisions whose consequences they can see.

This, at least, is what we’ll try to do.

Our good news is that we’ve been fortunate to see our work improving people’s lives, and thus making transit more resilient and effective. We led the design process for networks that are now operating in Houston, Columbus, Indianapolis, Richmond, Anchorage and now, just last week, San Jose and Silicon Valley in California (VTA). Auckland, New Zealand’s spectacular public transit renaissance includes a network redesign that I worked on in 2012, and that finally rolled out last year.

We just finished our work on a giant redesign project in Dublin, our first job in the European Union, and we hope to see it on the street in a year or two. Right now, we’re in the midst of network design projects in Miami, Kansas City, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Chattanooga, and Alexandria, Virginia, among others.

But bus network design isn’t all we do, and 2019 was a year of branching out. We are doing more long range planning, including the Tucson Long Range Transit Plan this year. We’re helping universities and private companies think about transit. We’re providing crucial professional advice on land use plans, too many of which are done without deep thought about transit. We’re advising on a range of policy questions, helping people understand how decisions that are about other things determine whether effective service transit service will be possible.

So that’s our news. The new decade will be full of challenges, but I hope it’s also full of happiness and rewards for you. Let us all keep learning from each other.

Sincerely,

Jarrett Walker

New Year’s Resolution: Ignore Predictions

Posted on January 1, 2020 in Meditations, Prediction

We’ve all been trained to view the confident prediction as evidence of expertise. The expert commits to a prediction — “Blazers win by two, “Biden wins New Hampshire,” “We’ll all be riding driverless cars by 2019” — and we’re supposed to be impressed. “If he’s so confident, he must know what he’s talking about” we are supposed to think.

He doesn’t. The only statements about the future worth considering are those hedged with uncertainty and margins of error, where certainty is approached gradually through many people studying the facts. That’s the long, slow, misunderstood process by which we got to the consensus on climate change. But most practitioners of that craft don’t call this work prediction. They speak more humbly (and accurately) of projections and scenarios. They tell us that things are moving in a direction, or that some outcomes are more likely than another, or that “if nothing changes” it will look something like this in 2050.

Prediction isn’t humble in this way. Often it’s just a sales pitch: “Buy this product and you will be happy.” “Thanks to our product, public transit will soon be obsolete.” Ignore these claims utterly. They are not trying to make you smarter. As always when you hear any statement about a patented new thing, lean into the wind. The more you detect self-interest behind the prediction, the more you should doubt it.

When I say prediction-like things in my role as an expert, they are of two kinds. Either I am predicting the continued existence of physical facts, (“In 2100, an elephant still won’t fit inside a wineglass”¹) or I’m offering if-then statements that point to the listener’s power: “If you do this, it will have this effect”. I’m careful to stay in those bounds, where I’m certain. When journalists ask me “what will cities be like in 2030?” I decline.

Here’s the thing: Prediction — by which I mean any non-trivial assertion about the future — is the opposite of moral thinking, because it implies we are passive receivers of the future instead of creators of it.

Predictions tell us that we will happen anyway if accept the future passively, doing nothing to change it. But all credible, properly hedged projections about that future are dire. So we will act, and our action will disrupt all the models and assumptions and prejudices that make prediction possible.

To feel powerful, then, you must resolve to reject all confident predictions that you hear. Honor the projections and scenarios that reflect decades of humble work. But don’t let anyone tell you they know what the future will be. Nobody knows, and it would be cause for despair if they did.

(A much expanded version of this argument is in my Journal of Public Transportation paper here.)

Notes

¹ A more relevant insight about urban planning than you might think, as I explain near the beginning of most of my public speeches — this one, for example.

“To Predict with Confidence, Plan for Freedom”

Posted on April 8, 2018 in Access, General, Meditations, Philosophy, Prediction

The Journal of Public Transportation has a special issue out consisting of thinkpieces by a range of figures in the business. I’m honored to be there alongside industry leaders like Susan Shaheen of UC Berkeley, Graham Currie of Australia’s Monash University, Kari Watkins of Georgia Tech and Brian Taylor of UCLA, as well as our favorite operations and scheduling consultant, Dan Boyle.

My contribution is called “To Predict with Confidence, Plan for Freedom.” It basically outlines the argument of my next book, so this would be a great time to hear some critiques of it. Here’s the opening:

What will urban transportation be like in 10-20 years? How will automated vehicles interact with social and cultural trends to define the city of tomorrow? Will the vehicles of the future be owned or shared? How will pricing evolve to motivate behavior? What will happen to public mass transit? What other innovations can we expect that will transform the landscape? This paper, which is merely the outline of a larger argument, suggests three interconnected answers.
We can’t possibly know. History has always been unpredictable, punctuated with shocks, but if the pace of change is accelerating, then unpredictability may be increasing too.
We can reach many strong conclusions without knowing. A surprising number of facts about transportation, including some fairly counterintuitive insights that would be transformative if widely understood, can be described and justified solidly with little or no empirical ground, because they are matters of geometry and physics or of nearly axiomatic principles of biology.
Prediction may not be what matters anyway. If we abandoned hope of predicting the future, we could still describe a compelling outcome of transportation investment, one that motivates many people who will never care about a ridership prediction or economic impact analysis. We could also predict it in the sense that we can predict the continued value of pi. That idea is freedom, as transportation expands or reduces it.

So if that catches your interest, read the whole thing, and share your comments below!

Older posts